Cape Cod's lifeline runs through Newtown

In the 1990s, my wife and I moved to Newtown, Conn. We'd been on some assignments to odd corners of the world and were happy to find the quintessential New England village when my career took me to the glass-walled corporate bureaucracy farms that have sprouted up in the pastures and orchards of lower Connecticut and Westchester County.

By DAVID LARKIN

capecodtimes.com

By DAVID LARKIN

Posted Dec. 18, 2012 at 2:00 AM

By DAVID LARKIN

Posted Dec. 18, 2012 at 2:00 AM

» Social News

In the 1990s, my wife and I moved to Newtown, Conn. We'd been on some assignments to odd corners of the world and were happy to find the quintessential New England village when my career took me to the glass-walled corporate bureaucracy farms that have sprouted up in the pastures and orchards of lower Connecticut and Westchester County.

Newtown is a very welcoming community. People "from away," as we would say on Cape, are quickly enlisted into support groups for the historical society, the library, the PTA, the garden club, the churches. Our house on Main Street was typical. It had been continuously occupied since 1760. It had a street number, but was universally known as "Thankeful House," a name given a century before us by an Episcopalian cleric who lived there. Main Street is lined with such homes, along with the library, the general store, the bank, the police station. It's wonderful to walk the old bluestone sidewalks, which heave here and there to make room for the roots of giant maple trees. People say hello and wave from their porches.

Main Street is U.S. Route 6 — the same Grand Army of the Republic highway that heads west across the country from Provincetown. From the giant flag pole smack in the middle of the main intersection in town, Route 6 runs down Church Hill. The road leads past the ice cream shop and the Newtown Diner, past the I-84 interchange (which has taken most of the through traffic off the village roads), and down to the ravine in Sandy Neck, carved by the Pootatuck River. Water power fueled a couple small mills in its day, but the Industrial Revolution was pretty much limited to making buttons and boxes to feed the hat industry in neighboring Danbury. The box company is still there, but Newtown is much more rural than commercial or industrial. To be sure, most of the surrounding hills are now expansive house lots or perhaps gentlemen farmers. There is still a working dairy farm, though, the last in Fairfield County.

Newtown is a place where families celebrate holidays together on Main Street. At this season, the town gathers in the Ram Pasture, a commons at the foot of Main Street, for the Christmas tree lighting. As Main Street residents, our job was to put out paper bag luminaries, which lined the street for a mile, and one year we took our turn on the charity tour of decorated houses. On Labor Day, the annual parade draws huge crowds to the street. And on Halloween, children from all those wooded lots out on the rural roads come to Main Street to take advantage of our clustered houses. With good weather, it was easy to count 400 or 500 eager or shy outstretched hands. But it was the kind of town where some of the retired folks on Main Street would find a sack with a couple hundred bags of M&M's left on the stoop a week before beggars' night to help with the cost.

Newtown was the kind of place people would want to raise their kids. On Friday morning, in less than an hour, that 300-year-old Newtown was erased. No one will hear "Newtown" again without thinking not of the welcoming village, but of the violent, horrific, incomprehensible tragedy. There is a void in my heart where that other Newtown was.